"You know he loves you, right?"
And though Alice knew it, she still couldn't help the overwhelming bitterness that lit her grate at the thought of why he'd gone. "Is that what it means when a guy runs back to his ex nowadays?"
Vivic shrugged his hands to the air. "Hey I know nothing 'bout all that human gobbledygook. All I know is that the lil prince I know would save that Edward fellow if he needed it, and he hates him. Make of that what you will."
So Alice did. She thought long and hard and free and soon as all that anger had gone, her thinking cleared. Sieg had told her about all of his club expeditions, all about the things he'd done to forget about her and who he'd done them with. Memory like his, He'd told Alice every name he'd ticked off his list with astonishing detail and that running tally was long.
"So fucking long." She muttered. And what she knew was that Sieg always whored himself out in threes; something about his sacred number being that or whatever. He been limiting himself to three girls a decade since they'd parted, two of which had gone missing this year. That couldn't be normal.
Dora was the remaining last and what Alice knew about Dora Johanna Bishop was that she was an army vet with a Ph.D in Forensic Science. A scientist turned hooker—didn't fucking see that everyday.
Dora was also known to be pretty tough, and what army vet wasn't? Aye, the way Sieg talked about her—the girl could pack a mean left hook and keep 'em coming. That along with the 'Handle it myself' streak she was packing made it clear that something was wrong. But how wrong?
Normal, human mess wrong? Or reaper wrong? No. No. "It can't be them." And how could it be? Niles hadn't picked up any Westers, Sieg had said it himself and Sieg wasn't in the business of lying if he could help it. She remembered it now, he always squeezed his eyes shut before he lied. Some kind of nervous tick like he was pretending lying didn't exist, like it hurt. It was his tell.
He'd done it that night at the Asylum. So no, it couldn't be the reapers. She'd just finished convincing herself about it all when the hairs on her neck started to stand. Her heart rate picked up out of the fucking blue, and that sent her veins into a frenzy— beating all over her body like a thousand little tentacles infused with little vibrators set to that delicious "Bzeep-bzeep" setting all full of ecstasy. Except what she felt was in no way good, she felt doom...worst than she'd ever felt it before and that brought tears to her eyes for along too came not fear, but terror.
Oh it begin to feel so stuffy, her wide room suddenly started to feel like a cage. Suddenly, she had a phobia of everything living and crapping. Oh what a horrible feeling!
And that was just it—a feeling. One she'd felt before, seen before. Aye. Vivic's arrival had brought out that same reaction in Sieg. She remembered feeling the accelerated rhythm of his beating heart, seeing how rapid his chest falls had gone, remembered the unnatural fear cracking his voice—forcing him back to puberty.
Unnatural fear....unnatural—not her own but induced by something's presence. Aye, she rose after that and though she was still shaking, she told herself that it wasn't her own fear and that Sieg would come for her.
It was thinking along those lines that reminded her of them; the goofer bullets in the smithy. Sieg had made about a whole box worth, but between the two guns and her small hands—Alice only carried twelve bullets back into the house. She decided to load each gun with six slugs each and while loading the second Sig, Vivic came down the stairs chewing a pack of licorice—just. Like. That.
"Going buck hunting, Princess?"
Alice shook her head. "I think they're here, Viv."
"Oh god, You feel it too, huh?" He came closer. "I was hoping I'd finally gotten diabetes, but there's death in the air. Everything just smells grey, if you know what I mean."
She didn't, but she did need to know how. "I mean, you said Niles picked up nothing—could it have made a mistake?"
Vivic shook his head so fast, it almost rolled off his shoulders. "That sonar thing is dead accurate. You'd have to be Death itself to be able to hide yourself. Damn powerful...you'd have to be Death."
Or his son.
"Then how?"
The lights flickered.
"Viv-"
"I know."
Licorice long forgotten, Vivic caught the second gun mid-air and released the safety just as the lights fully died—leaving the two back to back and in the darkness.
She was too human now to hear like she once did, nevertheless see as well; the darkness clouded over her eyes like a thick, blanket of smoke in a glass box—she couldn't see a damn thing and when Vivic moved away, breathing a one-two-three was all she could do not to scream at him to not leave her.
So easy does it, she started towards the stairs—Carlisle's office lay right beside them and the last pack of Goofer dust was in there; if she could just get there...make it before she was caught.
And she did—the door gave this loud creak and she fled in there like a gust of wind. She knocked things over patting down the desk and drawers for the burlap sack; she found it by the coat rack behind the desk and just as she managed to tear it open—something cased the back of her head and shoved it face first to the desk.
A lightning-like pain exploded on her forehead and she felt her brain go round its prison like a spinning top. She bit through it though, trying her hardest to fight whoever was holding her like a lil doll but they slammed her face down again, and again, again 'til her eyes lost focus.
'Til her breathing slowed, 'til all the fight had gone from her body like a stone sinking down the deep blue sea or was it better to say, the Wide Sargasso Sea?
